


Sorry What Did You Say?

by imkerfuffled



Category: Young Wizards - Diane Duane
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-20
Updated: 2015-12-20
Packaged: 2018-05-07 18:47:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,119
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5467205
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/imkerfuffled/pseuds/imkerfuffled
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Kit considered himself immune to most of the bizarre shapes, sizes, colors, and accoutrements favored by the extraterrestrials he met on his travels, but very little could have prepared him for one such extraterrestrial showing up in broad daylight on his front doorstep.</i>
</p><p>Alternately titled: The Powers That Be Do Not Pay Me Enough For This Sh*t</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sorry What Did You Say?

**Author's Note:**

> I came across [this tumblr post,](http://azzandra.tumblr.com/post/119109261461/whenever-i-see-a-post-on-tumblr-suggesting-aliens) and my mind immediately flew to yw. Because why not.
> 
> Slight spoilers for stuff in Interim Errantry. Like, tiny spoilers. Minuscule. They're really not even spoilers. 

Kit considered himself immune to most of the bizarre shapes, sizes, colors, and accoutrements favored by the extraterrestrials he met on his travels, but very little could have prepared him for one such extraterrestrial showing up in broad daylight on his front doorstep. This particular alien looked like a blue, gelatinous blob the size of a small pony, with smaller green lumps sticking to their surface. As he swung the door open, his first thought was one of recognition, like perhaps he’d seen a creature like this at the Crossings before, or… The more he thought about it, the more they looked disconcertingly similar to a dish he’d once ordered there.

And they were standing—oozing? slowly coagulating?—right on his front porch, in plain view of any neighbor who happened to stick their nose out a window.

“Um…” Kit said, unable to come up with a better greeting at the moment due to the image that popped into his head of Tom and Carl telling him off for singlehandedly blowing Earth’s _ashtafrith_ status.

“Are you Garmbeta ‘Udtigeth?” the alien asked. As they spoke, a swarm of bubbles rose to the surface of their ‘head,’ which appeared to be the source of their odd, bubbling speech, like something more viscous than water boiling on a stovetop. It took a few seconds of blinking mutely at the alien for Kit to realize that ‘Garmbeta ‘Udtigeth’ was supposed to mean ‘Carmela Rodriguez,’ and suddenly this entire situation made much more sense.

“Carmela!” Kit shouted into the house, “It’s for you!” To the alien, he said, “Look, did anyone see you on your way here? ‘Cause this planet still doesn’t believe in aliens, and I don’t want any more awkward questions from the neighbors.” _Or the local, deceptively scary Seniors,_ he thought to himself.

“I was not observed,” the alien said.

“Right, well, scoot forward a bit, so you’re covered by the selective visibility cloak.” While the alien obliged by rolling their massive bulk toward the door, accompanied by loud, wet squelching sounds that Kit decided he would ignore for his stomach’s sake, Kit waited for Carmela to come barreling through the door. But she never came.

“Carmela?” Kit shouted again.

The only answering cry came from his mama somewhere out of sight. “She’s not here. I think she went out shopping with Nita.”

Kit groaned, vaguely recalling that conversation from earlier in the morning. (It had gone something like: “Kit, help, she wants me to go to a board meeting about running planet Earth.” “Look, you got yourself into this, Neets. Peach did tell you to read the fine print before you sign.” And then Nita threw a couch cushion at him.)

Meanwhile, the alien was bobbing up and down on his porch in an annoyed-looking manner.

“Er, right, sorry about that,” Kit said, “Carmela’s out right now, but I’m her brother, so I can take care of whatever you needed her for.”

In response, the alien’s ‘skin’ began rippling and churning, and for one panicked second Kit thought they were having some kind of alien fit and he might get stuck with a dead blue blob lying in front of his house, and how would he explain _that_ to his parents? A tiny, extremely unwanted voice in the back of his head told him he could probably eat them if that happened, and Kit resolved never to get food at the Crossings ever again.

But his fears and invasive thought turned out to be unfounded, because before long the alien’s surface had calmed back down, and a small, raspberry-covered lump was protruding from their front. Kit blinked again, and the alien nudged that portion of their anatomy toward him, as if inviting him to… do what?

“Take it,” the alien said slowly in a voice that seemed to imply severe unintelligence on Kit’s part.

Kit reached out and grabbed the lump between two fingers, unsure of what he was supposed to do next. After a second, the alien deflated a bit as they let out a puff of air that sounded a lot like a sigh, and they squelched backwards again, forcing Kit to unwittingly pull the lump out of their body.

The lump, as it turned out, was actually the grip of what appeared to be a stereotypical alien weapon. The plastic-like body of the weapon—still covered in a sticky blue substance that Kit didn’t want to think about—looked like a child’s water gun, and instead of a barrel a long, green rod stuck out of its end. Three consecutive rings the same shade as the rod revolved slowly around it with no obvious connections that kept them from falling off.

Kit’s first thought was, _Oh no, ‘Mela’s back in the alien weapons trade,_ and his second thought was, _What do these blue people want with a gun like this if they don’t have hands?_

“Hey,” the alien said, startling Kit out of his worst-case-scenario visions of Carmela dropping out of college to run an intergalactic gun cartel. “I wouldn’t ask this normally, but I need it for the records, so… What are you?” Even with the dangers of anthropomorphizing aliens, Kit thought he could safely assume that this one sounded embarrassed.

“I’m an Earth human,” Kit said, using the Speech word for his classification of humanoids.

“Yes, but… what _are_ you?” the alien asked. When Kit just stared at them blankly, they continued in a rush, “You know, what’s your _glorpglooph?”_

“Um…?”

“Well, I can’t keep calling you _you_ can I?” the alien cried.

It took some thinking for Kit to figure that one out. Finally, through heavy application of Speech translation to the alien’s native language, he realized there was some sort of pronoun attached to the word ‘you’ that roughly implied a kind of non-gender. It had slight parallels to the pronoun set in the Speech that Kit had been using to describe the alien, though Kit’s translated better to ‘gender-ambiguous,’ to be used between members of different species who weren’t familiar with each other’s various gender presentations yet. In the Speech it was considered polite, but Kit got the feeling that in this creature’s culture it would be tantamount to calling someone an ‘it’ to their face in English.

On the other hand, _glorpglooph_ didn’t seem to have any association with gender, so Kit wasn’t sure what to think.

“Uh, could you repeat that?” he asked, wondering if he might have heard them wrong.

“What’s your _glorpglooph?”_ the alien said again, “Are you a _glub_ , a _plop_ , or a _gloop?”_

“A… a what?” They were clearly pronouns of some sort, but unlike any Kit had ever come across.

“Your _glorpglooph,”_ the alien said, getting more and more worked up as Kit failed to understand, “How do you not know your own _glorpglooph?”_

“I don’t think we have those here,” Kit said, “Is it anything like a gender?”

“What’s ‘gender?’” the alien asked.

 _Oh boy,_ Kit thought. He had come across a handful of species who had no concept of gender, and more for whom gender had nothing to do with sex organs, but none with an entirely separate system of classification, as this one seemed to have. _I’m going to have to ask Cheleb about this later._

“It’s, uh… nevermind,” he said, realizing that if he tried to explain the concept of gender as it pertained to Earth culture, he would be here all day. _That could be a good thing though. Carmela would probably get back by then, and I could chew her out for having alien mailmen show up at our house. Come to think of it… why_ is _this guy here? Can’t she just get everything from the Crossings?_

“Look, I can’t just put you down as nothing. My boss will get mad,” the alien said, “Can I just… I’m just going to fondle you to see what you secrete, okay?”

“ _Fondle_ me?” Kit cried, “Nobody’s _fondling_ me, you hear?”

“No! It’s not—” the little lumps on the alien’s surface popped in and out of their skin in apparent frustration, “It’s probably a translation error. Here, just let me… here…” Before Kit could say anything more in protest, the alien rushed forward and pressed themselves up against Kit’s side. He froze. Slowly, the alien rolled away with a massive squelch. Kit tried not to grimace or stare too much at the blue mucous stain that now covered half his body, and he prayed that it would all wash off easily.

For a second, the alien held completely still. Then, in a subdued voice, they said, “I do not know what I just experienced.”

“Um…” Kit found himself at a loss for words, “You said something about secretion earlier?”

“Yes,” the alien said quietly, “ _Glubs_ secrete sodium, _plops_ secrete chlorine, and _gloops_ secrete hydrogen.”

“Oh. Alright then,” Kit said.

“But you don’t secrete _any_ of those things!” the alien moaned.

“I do, actually,” Kit said, trying to be helpful, “But I think you just, er, fondled my jeans. Those aren’t actually part of me. The sodium and chlorine I secrete as salt, and the hydrogen is in water, which…” He petered off. The alien’s lumps had all sucked deep into their body, and they started quivering alarmingly. “Are you okay?”

“That can’t be,” they said, “You can’t secrete _all_ of them! No no no no no, I should never have taken this job. Never ever. The boss said I’d meet strange people this far out, but this is too much.”

“I’m sorry,” Kit said, unsure what else he could say, “Actually, why _are_ you here? Carmela usually gets all her stuff from the Crossings.”

“We don’t do business with the Crossings,” the alien muttered. Kit wasn’t sure how to respond to that either. He’d found that, for most alien species, ‘we don’t do business with the Crossings,’ was tantamount to a New Yorker saying, ‘I don’t approve of public transportation.’ He decided not to question it.

“Listen, why is this _glorgloop—”_

“ _Glorpglooph,”_ the alien corrected him.

“Right, why is that such a big deal?” he asked, “Is it some sort of health thing? Do some of your species’ biologies not react well with certain things on your planet?” Kit didn’t know if he was getting his point across well, but the alien seemed to understand.

“No, of course not!” they said, “That would be racist.”

“Oh,” Kit said, “Okay, how about you just put me down for, what did you say, _glub?_ Just say that’s what I am and call it a day.”

“But… _glorpglooph_ has nothing to do with your star’s position in the sky,” the alien said, plainly confused.

“Sorry, it’s an expression. I should be used to not saying stuff like that by now,” Kit said, “I just meant, pretend I’m a _glub,_ and don’t worry about it.”

“I can’t do that!” cried the alien, “You can’t claim you’re one _glorpglooph_ when you’re really something else. That’s just wrong!”

Kit decided he probably shouldn’t get into trans- _glorpglooph_ rights with this creature when he had no idea if that even existed. Instead, he shrugged and said, “I don’t know what to tell you, then.”

Just when he thought the alien’s tiny, green lumps would start completely detaching from their body with the speed they were popping in and out of the alien’s skin, Kit heard the faint yet unmistakable sound of his sister’s voice coming from upstairs, back from her intergalactic shopping trip/potentially illegal business meeting.

“CARMELA!” he yelled at the top of his lungs, “GET DOWN HERE, NOW!”

 What sounded like a herd of elephants came thundering down the stairs, and within seconds, Carmela appeared at Kit’s shoulder.

“What’s up, doc?” she said. And then, “ _Oooooh,_ the new blender’s here! Thanks, Kit.” She plucked the ray gun from Kit’s fingers.

“Um, this guy wants to know your _gooflorph,”_ Kit said, too shocked about discovering that the alien weapon was actually meant for food preparation to get angry at her.

“You mean _glorpglooph?”_ she asked, and just like that Kit was angry again.

“Yeah, that,” he snapped, “You deal with it.”

“Sure,” she said, “Just put us down as _glubs_ and call it a day. We’ve got a different arbitrary social construct that doesn’t really translate to yours.”

“I. Can’t. Do. That,” the alien repeated, beginning to quiver again.

“Sure you can.” Carmela pulled a bar of chocolate out of her pocket, and all of the alien’s lumps (which Kit was beginning to think were their eyes) popped out of their skin. “Can’t you?”

“On second thought, Garmbeta ‘Udtigeth, I believe I might be able to do that after all,” the alien said.

Kit rolled his eyes.


End file.
